The Self-Love Journey

Self-love And True Love Is One In The Same Journey

It's become undeniable for me that my journey to love with my twin flame, and my journey of learning to love myself, are one in the same journey. There's been many times that I've tried to figure my way around it, but I'm shown over and over that one can't happen without the other, and both journeys are for each other. And what started as me realizing that learning to love myself is an essential part of my connection to my twin flame, has grown into me also realizing that it's an incredibly beautiful gift in the connection too. Without self-love, we can only seek ideas of love, or play characters in stories of what we try to call love… but to truly find love, it has to start to within our own heart.

So as much as I have struggled and tussled with the journey of self-love, along the way I have started to find so much gratitude and love for the twin flame connection repeatedly guiding me back to it. One way it guides me is that I feel the energy of my twin flame draw me into experiences where I have to face my fears, and make the choice to let go of false beliefs I hold about life, about love, and about who I am. The connection will not let me in anyway, hold onto anything, that isn't my most beautiful truth, and by giving me those chances to dissolve my grip on those things, is giving me the gift of remembering and rediscovering the incredible beauty of my own soul.

The other way I feel it guide me to self-love is through miracles that unfold around me that couldn't possibly unfold without a love that defies logic and reason and overcomes fear. And in those moments I'm given the chance to decide I'm worthy of a love that's magical and powerful beyond my dreams.

“It’s all about falling in love with yourself and sharing that love
with someone who appreciates you, rather than looking for love to compensate for a self love deficit.”

– Eartha Kitt

Self-love Brings True Love

If we seek love through someone or something outside of us first, our experiences we have that we call love will always be created from the place of us trying to take love from another and compensate for the love we don't have within, and we'll play those experiences out with other people who are trying to do the same. Those experiences just can't ever be true love… they are experiences at their worst of incredible pain, and at their best of need, companionship, attachment, somewhere other than alone… but they are never experiences of true, pure love.

I was born with a calling in my soul to true love, so when it's come to taking this self-love journey, for me there hasn't been too much of a choice, but no question, it's a path that asks you to be brave. It asks you to look within, and dig deeper until everything that separates you from love is dissolved. I've been taken through the darkest darkness where I've faced heartbreak, confusion, complete loss of sense of self, and even a sense of what's real. It's been this challenging process of learning to take my focus off of external things, and turn inward to see what those external experiences are asking me to discover about myself. I try to just be gentle with myself and remember that it's a journey of baby steps, and that those baby steps to self-love, are what brings true love. So it's repeatedly giving myself whatever love I can, in whatever place I'm in, however I can give it, and letting whatever that is, be ok. And that right there is the self-love journey… going into your own heart over and over until you've remembered how to know and feel love from within, and trusting that in that place where you find love within yourself, is where the key to everything else is held too.

“If you truly loved yourself, you could never hurt another.”

– Buddha

Self-love Isn't Selfish

There are many belief systems that strongly fight for the idea that love means sacrifice of self, but within the relationships based on that idea are people who are drained of love, not filled with it. And people who don't feel enough love feel hurt, so you have hurt people, hurting other people, instead of loving people who are giving love. We cannot give others what we do not first hold within ourselves, so to give love to others we must have love within us to give. Not only is self-love not selfish, it's the most loving thing we can ever do for anyone else. How we treat other people is a reflection of who we believe we are. If I believe that I am a kind, honest, loving, faithful, affectionate, beautiful person, then for me to be kind, honest, loving, faithful, affectionate, and beautiful to another, all I have to do is be myself, and all of those things will naturally flow from me. But for me to have those things within me to give to another, I have to feel worthy enough and love myself so deeply, that I believe that those things are who I am. So it's not about sacrificing myself for another, it's about filling myself up and overflowing love to another.

“Close your eyes and imagine the best version of you possible.
That's who you really are, let go of any part of you that doesn't believe it.”

– C. Assaad

Truly Finding Self-love

As I've traveled on my journey to self-love, I tried for a really long time to find it through what most people described as self-love, but as hard as I tried I just never got to a place where I truly felt like I deep down in my soul, authentically and without question, loved myself. I finally started to figure out that the journey to self-love that most people try to travel is this… they start in a place where they don't love themselves, then they analyze themselves and all of their broken parts and try to fix as many of those broken things as they can, and then truly reaching self-love is a matter of accepting the person they are as-is. My biggest struggle with this process is the part of eventually just accepting myself as-is, whether or not “as-is”, is who I actually dream of being. I realized that what I was trying to call a journey to self-love, was really just me trying to mentally trick myself into thinking I loved being someone who I didn't actually want to be.

I always just ended up in a place where I felt like there had to be more to it. Then along the way as I began to explore my spirituality further, I started coming across different beliefs that began to open my eyes to what that “more” could be. The most beautiful belief I began to form is the idea that every single thing we don't passionately love about ourselves is a layer of illusion we are meant to shed, so it's not about accepting what feels unacceptable, it's about giving ourselves permission to release it. And then, everything we do desire to be is a desire we have for a reason, and that all of the wishes we have inside of who we want to be are actually messages from our soul calling us to remember the truth of who we are. The quote I posted above by C. Assaad is one of my favorite quotes in the whole world because I feel like it so beautifully captures that belief. So for me, self-love is not a journey of settling for less than I dream and accepting a “me” that doesn't truly feel like me, but instead, I believe that the journey to self-love is letting myself release any bit of energy that doesn't feel like my truth, letting myself let go of limitations, listening to every wish and desire that I feel in my soul, honoring those desires as the whispers of my soul spark, and then allowing myself to discover how to bring all of those qualities and energies into my being, and to truly become the most beautiful being I could ever dream to be.

It's Not Fixing Yourself, It's Remembering Yourself

Letting myself explore these kinds of beliefs has changed my idea of finding self-love from a process of “healing”, to a journey of “whole-ing”. The process of healing had me believing that I was a broken and damaged being who had an endless list of problems to fix, and that I would spend eternity “working on myself”. Not only was I not learning to love myself more, I was perpetually focused on the things that were wrong with me, and focused on who I don't want to be. The journey of whole-ing has allowed me to shift from the mission of never-ending problem solving, to a journey of listening to my soul, shedding the layers of all that I am not, and allowing myself to remember the beautiful the truth of my soul spark.

Discovering Your Soul Spark

While it feels like a journey of discovering my soul spark, I believe it's really a journey of remembering… remembering the beautiful and perfect soul essence that God created me to be, and bringing that soul essence of who I truly am into my being, and radiating it from within.